19.1 The basic interface

The top-level of the package defines four functions. If you import compiler, you will get these functions and a collection of modules contained in the package.

parse( buf): Returns an abstract syntax tree for the Python source code in buf. The function raises SyntaxError if there is an error in the source code. The return value is a compiler.ast.Module instance that contains the tree.

parseFile( path): Return an abstract syntax tree for the Python source code in the file specified by path. It is equivalent to parse(open(path).read()).

walk( ast, visitor[, verbose]): Do a pre-order walk over the abstract syntax tree ast. Call the appropriate method on the visitor instance for each node encountered.

compile( source, filename, mode, flags=None, dont_inherit=None)

Compile the string source, a Python module, statement or expression, into a code object that can be executed by the exec statement or eval(). This function is a replacement for the built-in compile() function.

The filename will be used for run-time error messages.

The mode must be 'exec' to compile a module, 'single' to compile a single (interactive) statement, or 'eval' to compile an expression.

The flags and dont_inherit arguments affect future-related statements, but are not supported yet.

compileFile( source): Compiles the file source and generates a .pyc file.

The compiler package contains the following modules: ast, consts, future, misc, pyassem, pycodegen, symbols, transformer, and visitor.

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